In brief: In a new report, Internet provider AT&T said that scans for vulnerable IoT devices spiked in the first half of 2016, months before the Mirai botnet, made up largely of IoT devices, launched denial of service attacks on DYN and other targets.
In-brief: More than 14,000 Internet domains stopped using managed DNS services from Dyn, the New Hampshire based company, following an October botnet attack on the company, data from Bitsight suggests.
Some of the nation’s top experts on cyber security and the Internet of Things urged Congress to take a more forceful approach to securing a burgeoning population of Internet connected devices before security and quality issues undermine consumer confidence. Members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce were told in separate testimony that security problems such as the recent denial of service attacks linked to the Mirai botnet will become more common and could threaten the integrity of the Internet and of the nation’s broader economy if left unaddressed. The Committee heard from Dr. Kevin Fu of the University of Michigan, Bruce Schneier of IBM and a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Dale Drew, the Chief Security Officer of Level3 Communications. All three, to varying degrees, advised a bigger government role in setting standards for devices connected to the Internet. And all three warned that a failure to […]
In-brief: a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack resulted in the loss of heating to two buildings in the city of Lappeenranta in eastern Finland according to a report by local media, the latest example of downstream effects of cyber attacks on connected infrastructure. Editor’s note: updated with comment from Mr. Rounela, the CEO of Valtia. 11/8/2016
In-brief: An article in Quartz finds a common theme in stories about the massive denial of service attacks from IoT botnets and exploding hover boards: a sketchy global supply chain.
